| EGYPT - KARNAC TEMPLE While touring Upper Egypt in 1985, good fortune enabled me to experience the Karnac temple twice. During the daylight the sheer magnitude of the towering columns lining the temple was breathtaking. I was at a loss wondering how the ancient Egyptians could have managed to engineer lifting and placing the flat limestone slabs that crowned the top. Earlier that day I'd been to an abandoned obelisk site in a granite quarry beside the Nile. It seems these ancient engineers had this simple and brilliant way to separate the gigantic portion of stone they wanted from the granite bed; they strategically chiseled deep holes along the desired outline, put dry wood inside then poured water on the wood. The natural rate of expansion of the wood absorbing the water caused a deep continuous crack along the rock face, resulting in the rough stone being released from the surrounding granite! The would-be obelisk was then laboriously rolled on top of wooden logs down to the Nile and rafted to its final destination. In this case, however, the obelisk cracked in half in the process and was abandoned. When I returned
to the Karnac temple again that night I had an unexpected experience.
A couple of years before at university I'd researched a paper on Black
Holes for my astronomy class, and became lightly acquainted with Einstein's
theory of curved space and time, an idea that captured my imagination.
At Karnac I found myself alone amongst the columns that reached deeply
into the night. I gazed up at the impossible silhouette of their height
in the darkness and recognized the Big Dipper hanging upside down between
them, delightfully familiar and yet unfamiliarly positioned in this ancient
place. With the sad inadequacy of words let me say that in that fleeting
celestial glimpse, time and space became one. I imagined the Pharaoh who
built the temple gazing at the same stars thousands of years before in
the same spot where I now stood, stars that I knew so well right side
up on the opposite face of the world. I experienced the wonder of what
seemed to be a spontaneous cosmic connection which simultaneously spanned
and meshed millennia and miles into this one infinite moment.
|